Yury Afanasiev: The end of Russia?

[Prof.Yury Afanasiev is a prominent historian and democratic activist. He is the founder of the Russian State University for the Humanities and Honorary President of the Russian State University.]

I Russia's
rulers behave like a government of occupation. So why do the people support
them uncritically?

In recent months we have witnessed a
series of actions from the Russian government that seem at first glance
paradoxical. I will list some of the most important:

for the first time since the withdrawal
of the Soviet army from Afghanistan, Russian armed forces began and ended a
"real" (not "cold") war" outside
Russia (in Georgia);

for the first time since the collapse
of the USSR, strategic bombers and ships of the Russian armed forces and navy
have been sent to Latin America.

the return to "cold war" rhetoric has
reached the point where the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs used obscene
expressions when talking with a foreign (British) colleague

Russian ships stationed in Sevastopol
fought in the Black Sea against Georgia, in defiance of the Ukrainian
president's ban on deploying them without informing Ukraine;

Prime Minister Putin played the atomic
blackmail card against the Czech Republic and Poland, using that "special" KGB way
of his, loaded and enigmatic.

with the blatant and increasing polarisation
in the material wealth of the Russian population, the military budget has been
increased by almost 30%;

the President of Russia welcomed the
election of the new US President with a promise that he would station rockets
in the Kaliningrad Oblast which would threaten America's European allies.

These things seem paradoxical. After all, we're living in a nuclear
age.

None of these events fit into the
contemporary picture. Yet they can all be explained unparadoxically. However, in
my opinion, this explanation will be even gloomier and more alarming than the
"apparent paradoxes", the reality which is, as it were, shrouded in mist.

Take a look at what is happening before
our very eyes. Take a good, hard look at it - realistically, rationally, in its
historical context. If you do that, you start thinking you've gone mad, or at
least that you're well on the way to it.

If these thoughts seem altogether too terrifying
or strange, if you're so confident of your mental state that you can dismiss
them, then what you what you are feeling will be no less terrible. For you will
be feeling the void enveloping you.

A government of occupation

It is not an absolute void, of course. Here
and there, however rarely, you can still find people who see things more or
less as you do. For me, they are
like shining lights. I try to take a steer from them in the darkness.

But even then the feeling of emptiness remains.
For it has more than one cause. The problem is not just the government. If this
were the case, then the darkness could at least partly be dispelled by
understanding - even the grimmest actions of the authorities can at least be
understood. However, even once you've done that you can't dispel that feeling
of emptiness, because you don't know what to do with your understanding.

If you think things through properly, if
you interpret them rigorously, the government's behaviour can only really be
explained as alienated from its people. It is a government of occupation, a "Golden
Horde" that is illegitimate and criminal as well.

Even when you are quite sure, even when
your ideas are well-founded and supported by the facts, where do you turn to
with this understanding? Obvious, you would think: you turn not to the
government, but to the people.

II Understanding the terrible enthusiasm of the masses

But turning to the people only makes the
emptiness worse. For the emptiness is coming from there too, from those
"masses" at whom the grim actions of the authorities are directed. Those "masses" are not just putting
up with the actions of the authorities in silence. They have started supporting
them enthusiastically, as they did in the 1930s.

What makes matters worse is that it has
happened before, this enthusiastic response of the masses to being manipulated
and ridden roughshod over: it happened before the First World War and immediately
after it. Then, the people and the Bolsheviks were so close that it is still
not clear who gave whom more support and who was directing whom. But we do more
or less know what the result of this coming together was. We know that it was
lasting and fatal for both sides - vis the year 1991.

At the same time, we also know that the
Russian people has never regarded the state as "a friend", and the normal
response to state coercion has always been cunning, wiles, and finding ways
around the law. While appearing to toe the line and be submissive, the people
have always kept a clenched fist in their pockets. These outward signs of
submissiveness and obedience were regarded (and still are) as a predisposition
for patient endurance, and this habit can, if we wish, be interpreted as the
people's support for the government.

At the moment Putin and his president
appear to enjoy universal support. As the slogan, doggedly and regrettably
repeated in Russia goes: "The people and the government are one". What this
means is that neither the government nor the people have a modern, rational
understanding of what either one or the other. It is not just
the government that is questionable in this respect, but the people too. They
have not yet started playing an active role in their own history. They remain a
mass, a crowd. It's only in
the last 18-20 years that the amorphous, atomized Russian-Soviet mass has
started to become structured. But alas, the result is not the development of a
civil society, but of something more like criminal clans.

Some may find this concept upsetting.
They'll be inclined to conclude that "with your ideas about the people, you're
never going to get through to them". I understand this. That's why I say that we're facing the
void here too.

Periodic uprisings

Over many centuries, our people have endured
sufferings which, as Karamzin
put it, "you have to be villainous to endure". Hence the cunning, wiles and dual morality. But at the end
of the 18th century, Karamzin was not to know that for the Russian
people the greatest sufferings and the most morally corrupting consequences
were yet to come.

From time to time we rose up against
intolerable sufferings and the government. Once a century, with Razin, Pugachev or Lenin we
celebrated our "wild freedom". Then we put our clenched fist back in our
pockets and returned to our customary brutish existence.

Some people regarded these uprisings, joyfully
or cynically, as an awakening. But in their sufferings, reckless protests, and
savage anger, our people remained and remain a mass. A crowd that is worthy of
sympathy and quiet sorrow, a crowd that is sometimes terrifying and loathsome.
This is why the only people who have been able to get through to them in their
usual state of unconsciousness, their permanent readiness for rebellion have
been Lenin and Stalin, then Yeltsin and Putin. Who knows,perhaps in the near
future someone like Zhirinovsky and Limonov may be able to do so too?

III The intelligentsia, as unfree today as in the past

The feeling of emptiness only gets worse when you try and get
to grips with the views held by our creative and other intelligentsia, when you
try and make out its voice and civic position.

The emptiness gets even worse if you try
and listen to our contemporary intellectuals not so much as individuals, but
collectively, as the distinct voice of a particular "ethnos", or
ethnic group. In short, our
intellectuals today (except for a handful of outstanding people) are on the
side of the government, not of the wider population. In my view this is the
main reason why the population are still merely "the population", and have not
become a "people".

If anything, the feeling of emptiness emanating
from our intelligentsia gets worse when you consider the tradition of the last hundred years or more.
This is something which it is not done to discuss out loud or to write about it
as something that really exists and is understood down to the last detail. Thus
the very problem of "the tradition of the Russian intelligentsia", vanishes
into the void, enveloped in darkness.